Welkom, South Africa, was once the center of the world’s richest goldfields. After the mining industry collapsed, a dystopian criminal economy emerged in its place.
The syndicate would charge Simon more than twice as much to exit the mines. He remained underground for almost a year, subsisting on food provided by One Eye’s runners. He came away with too little money, so he went into the mines again, paying the same syndicate to lower him with a rope. He became accustomed to life underground: the heat, the dust, the darkness. He planned to remain there until he was no longer poor, but in the end he came out because he was starving.
But these new goldfields needed to be developed from scratch. There was no electricity or potable water. Vast maize fields spread across the grasslands. In 1947, a mining house called the Anglo American Corporation received permission to establish a new town, to be called Welkom—“welcome” in Afrikaans. The company’s founder, Ernest Oppenheimer, who was the richest man in South Africa, tasked a British planner named William Backhouse with designing the settlement.
In Welkom, a separate township was built for Black residents, set apart from the city by an industrial area and two mine dumps. One of the city planners’ main goals, according to a history of Welkom from the nineteen-sixties, was to “prevent the outskirts of the town being marred by Bantu squatters.” Named Thabong, or “Place of Joy,” the township lay in the path of the dust from the mines.
I first visited Welkom in late 2021. As I drove into the city, Google Maps announced that I had arrived, but around me it was dark. Then my headlights picked out a suburban home, followed by another. The entire neighborhood was without electricity. South Africa is in the midst of an energy crisis and experiences frequent scheduled power outages, but that was not the cause of this blackout.
In Welkom, the main destination for stolen gold was in Thabong, at a dormitory known as G Hostel. During apartheid, hostels housed migrant workers as a way of preventing them from settling permanently in cities; these hostels have since become notorious for crime and violence. G Hostel had multiple entrances and was difficult to surveil. It functioned as an illicit smelting house, where teams of men would crush and wash the gold, then process it into ingots.
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